Step 1: Materials

for this you need:

a craft cutter which works with Make the Cut and can accept accept arbitrary vector art. I'm using a Cricut with updated firmware (before the lawsuit happened). See this instructable for how that worked.

some sheets of type 6 plastic, aka shrink plastic or "Shrinky Dinks"

"make the cut" software, or similar

a crisp image of the gear you would like to replicate

an oven. (I use a toaster oven dedicated to baking plastics like shrinky dinks and sculpey).

Step 2: Locate gear images

Try to find the cleanest image of the gear you want that you can. I had to touch mine up in Photoshop to get them cleaner. The more crisp the image, the easier it will be for the cricut. Also, it's better if you find gears that are already in pairs, that way you know the teeth will line up.

I'm sure a lot of these gears have proper names, though I'm not sure what they are. If you know of any other cool gear designs, please let me know.

Note, some gears just wouldn't bake straight, like the pinion example below (with the red x). It seems to be better if the design isn't too thin

My experience with shrink plastic was that it always curled up. Did you have any special trick to keep it flat? I'd basically given up on ever using it again, but after seeing this I might give it another try.

By the way, although I do still have the Cricut and working MTC software, I've upgraded to a KNK MAXX cutter which is a much more industrial quality machine.

great instructable, but it sucks to hear that make the cut wont work anymore, but how does the cricut deny the use of the program? sure the company does, but how does the machine know whether or not to allow the information to cut stuff be sent to it?